At its core, hospitality rests upon human service. To quote Heads in Beds, Jacob Tomsky’s memoir of his years as a hotelier:

“Hospitality, no matter how slick it gets, will always be a business run by people who serve people. It will always be about service. It will always take a person to explain that, no, you cannot hook up your iPad to the toilet but you can use it to control the lights and wirelessly play music through the in-room speaker system.”

General managers must coordinate these complex, human logistics, and mistakes are inevitable given the complexity of this exercise. The challenge is identifying and recovering from these issues in the moment. Messaging provides a means to catch issues as they occur, delight guests, and improve operations.

The TripAdvisor review below provides an example of the challenges faced by general managers as they operate. Information is not readily passed across teams and shifts, so customers are forced to repeat themselves multiple times to different employees. Small problems are not addressed in the moment, and when left to fester take on outsized importance in the mind of the guest. The extent of customer dissatisfaction only becomes clear after the fact, and the hotel is forced to grovel for forgiveness. All this would have been preventable if the hotel had better lines of communication with the guest and the more efficient internal tools.